NEW ORLEANS (CNS) -- Serena was three months pregnant and in turmoil. The young Panamanian-born mother of two was suffering from diabetes, and personnel at the Causeway Medical Clinic in Metairie, Louisiana's largest abortion clinic, told her the disease could cause severe birth defects in her unborn child if she went ahead and had the baby.

The ambivalence Serena felt after her first consultation at the abortion clinic intensified overnight. As she was driven to the facility for her scheduled abortion on April 10, 2004 -- Holy Saturday -- she saw a group of people walking and praying on the sidewalk in front of the clinic. Serena -- who asked that her last name not be used in print -- got out of the car just a few feet from the clinic entrance, and then decided to make a U-turn.

She walked over to Pam Richard, who along with her husband, John, coordinates the New Orleans Archdiocesan Sidewalk and Prayer Ministry, and to Jesuit Father Richard C. Hermes, who was keeping vigil with a group of students from the Pro-Life Club at Jesuit High School in New Orleans. Serena's story has an ending -- actually a beginning -- that Richard says still gives her goose bumps.

On Nov. 23 Serena gave birth to her third son, 8-pound, 7-ounce Jaykob Angel, healthy in every way. On Jan. 16 pro-life supporters and the students at Jesuit High School gathered at the student chapel as Father Hermes baptized the baby who had been saved from death. The Richards served as Jaykob's godparents.

She walked over to Pam Richard, who along with her husband, John, coordinates the New Orleans Archdiocesan Sidewalk and Prayer Ministry, and to Jesuit Father Richard C. Hermes, who was keeping vigil with a group of students from the Pro-Life Club at Jesuit High School in New Orleans.

Your observations on the current state of the Jesuits is apropos, though.

Canisius University just had Hellary at their campus, and LeMoyne just expelled a grad student in the Education dept. for writing a paper (for a class) that advocated limited, supervised, parentally-mandated corporal punishment.

From what I know of Catholic schools, ruler marks across the knuckles were de rigeur!

the Causeway Medical Clinic in Metairie... told her the disease could cause severe birth defects in her unborn child if she went ahead and had the baby.

Untreated diabetics can indeed have problem pregnancies. I guess it would have been too much like right for the clinic to tell the woman that she needed to see an endocrinologist who was experienced in helping diabetic women through pregnancy.

I go to a university diabetes center. There are many happy diabetic women who have given birth with the proper medical care through facilities such as this.

In addition to women who are already diabetic when they become pregnant, many women have gestasional diabetes and give birth to healthy babies.

I'll risk getting flamed here and say that I think a woman should have choice in some limited circumstances. However, being lied to about medical realities is a disgusting tactic. It is obvious that Planned Parenthood is not about true informed choice, but about only one choice, and that is death.

If I could work my will, I'd allow abortions only if the life of the mother was in jeapordy.

Of course PP Naral, etc., want to butcher babies. It's a business. If you walk into a TV store, is the sales clerk going to tell you, "You know, I don't really think you should buy a TV." Heck no. He's gonna show you all the latest and greatest and tell you why you NEEEEEEED a TV desperately. They're in business; as such, they care about making money. They make more money from performing abortions than from not performing them.

I was asked if I wanted to terminate a pregnancy because with the medicine that I was on, the baby didn't have a chance to be normal. It would be grossly disfigured and mentally deficient if functioning at all.

I would like to report that that child is now 29 years old, the mother of 3, a college graduate (went to collge on a basketball scholarship) and the only problem that she had was she had minute optic nerves and therefore had no peripheral vision. We never told her basketball coaches. She compensated with hearing the opponent. She is one awesome gal.

I've had discussions with my mother about whether or not I could abort my child if it were a health risk to me. For me, it's an easy answer, absolutely not. I would rather die so that my child may live. I've already lived a full life, my unborn child has not. I would glady die for my child so that he or she may live. Yes, he or she may grow up without a mom, but under no circumstances could I or would I kill my unborn baby. Even if that means I have to die in the process.

Lot's of things can "threaten" the life of the mother, heck pregnancy itself is hardly risk free. But the only condition I am aware of where abortion is the only (or even a good) option is tubal (ectopic) pregnancy. And in that case the baby can't survive anyway.

Jesuit Father Richard C. Hermes pours holy water on the forehead of Jaykob Angel Myers, whose mother Serena decided to continue her pregnancy after seriously considering an abortion last April.

By PETER FINNEY Jr.

Serena was three months pregnant and in turmoil. The young Panamanian mother of two sons, ages 7 and 5, was suffering from diabetes, a condition that personnel at the Causeway Medical Clinic in Metairie, the state's largest abortion clinic, told her could cause severe birth defects if she went ahead and had her baby.

The ambivalence Serena felt after her first consultation at the abortion clinic intensified overnight. As she was driven to the facility for her scheduled abortion on April 10, 2004 - Holy Saturday - she saw a group of people walking and praying on the sidewalk in front of the clinic.

Serena got out of the car, just a few feet from the clinic entrance, and then decided to make a U-turn. She walked over to Pam Richard, who along with her husband John coordinates the Archdiocesan Sidewalk and Prayer Ministry, and to Jesuit Father Richard C. Hermes, who was keeping vigil with a group of students from the Pro-Life Club at Jesuit High School.

Father Hermes and Richard were soon joined by Josephite Father Joseph Campion, pastor of St. David Church, and they began to counsel Serena privately.

Serena's story has an ending - actually a beginning - that Richard says still gives her goose bumps. On Nov. 23, 2004 - two days before Thanksgiving - Serena gave birth to 8-pound, 7-ounce Jaykob Angel Myers, healthy in every way. On Jan. 16, Jesuit students and pro-life supporters gathered at the student chapel, where Father Hermes baptized the baby who had been saved from death. The Richards served as Jaykob's godparents.

"I AM very, very excited, and so happy and joyful," Serena said after the baptism. "I am just happy that this is a special day."

"Jaykob is already richly blessed," Father Hermes told the gathering. "He is surrounded by many people who have prayed for him. His pictures were sent out in innumerable e-mails. Now we desire to see him grow up as a young man in the Lord. Today Jaykob becomes a temple of the Holy Spirit. Our responsibilities as brothers and sisters in the Lord do not end here."

Richard said someone at the clinic had counseled Serena that because she was taking insulin, "the baby would be deformed. They said it would be safer for her to abort."

Serena went home and wrestled with her emotions. "I didn't want to do it," she said. "The night before, I prayed to God - I was in his hands. The next day when I went to the clinic I saw a lot of people. When I was parking the car, to me I saw lights, like angels, coming toward me. This is when I found the answer."

Serena wanted to see a doctor, and Father Hermes was able to get in touch with Dr. Richard Marino, the parent of one of Father Hermes' former students, who offered to see Serena at his office on the Monday after Easter. He oversaw Serena's prenatal care in the ensuing months.

Other "angels" arrived in the form of parishioners at Our Lady of Divine Providence Church in Metairie. They raised money and collected baby items for Serena. Others sent donations.

"In the end, what she needed was people to surround her with support and love and the confidence she could get the medical care she needed," Father Hermes said. "The people out in front of the clinic all of the time are the real warriors. If that presence had not been maintained over the years, this never would have happened. It was a beautiful moment, and it came on Holy Saturday. What a gift."

"So many people helped out," Richard said. "So many people told me they've heard of so many dreadful things, and they know this was a victory. This was an answer to prayer. I don't think that this was a coincidence that it was Holy Saturday. This was Jesus coming to deliver us from darkness."

Serena said Jaykob's middle name - Angel - sums up her emotions. "To me he's a little angel that came down from the sky," she said.

http://www.clarionherald.org/20050126/art004.htm

21
posted on 02/02/2005 3:31:29 PM PST
by cpforlife.org
(The Missing Key of The Pro-Life Movement is at www.CpForLife.org)

I know someone who was asked to do sidewalk intervention and prayer as penance. He was praying but did not feel able to intervene. Then a nun who was with them told him to go approach a young woman who was heading for the mill. She said she would pray for him.

When he walked up to the young woman, he didn't have to say a word. She said, "I prayed last night that if I was supposed to have this baby, someone would walk up to me today outside this place."

I was pregnant with twins - one developed normal and the other had sever deformity and doctors told me he had no chance to live and would probably die before birth. I was given the option to abort him, because there was a slight change his problems would hurt the other baby.

I said no and delivered two babys, one is a beautiful 2 1/2 year old boy and the other is our angel. Matthew lived for 20 minutes after birth and died in his daddy's arms then went straight home to Jesus.

Matthew means "gift of God" and he was even though I only had him for such a short time.

Children are a gift from God - I don't understand how any one could purposely end a pregnancy.

There are a handful of conditions where the child simply cannot survive pregnancy. Ectopic or similar non-uterine pregnancies are the most common - and they will kill the mother, sometimes with little warning. Actually, if doctors operate quickly enough to remove an ectopic (technically an abortion) they may be able to save the Fallopian tube and preserve the mother's future fertility.

Also, if something like HELLP syndrome or a serious placental abruption develops before the child is viable, and the child is NOT delivered anyways, both mother and baby will die.

Consider the irony in the name juxtaposed with what they push ... abortion kills an already 'produced human being', ends a produced being. [Embryo harvesting will also, but that's grist for another grin.] Planned? Parenthood? ... it's legalized serial killing, nothing more. And that is why we must end this farcical evil that is literally destroying our posterity and in the process our ability to stand against the secular degeneracy of our individual as well as collective moral fiber.

37
posted on 02/02/2005 7:46:39 PM PST
by MHGinTN
(If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote life support for others.)

You might have missed the story about the baby in Africa found attached to his mother's LIVER. Surgery at neaar natural term age (40 weeks is the usual) saved both he and his mother. You can read the story through this link to a free manuscript ... I think about fifty pages on from the beginning.

44
posted on 02/03/2005 8:17:41 PM PST
by MHGinTN
(If you can read this, you've had life support from someone. Promote life support for others.)

When he walked up to the young woman, he didn't have to say a word. She said, "I prayed last night that if I was supposed to have this baby, someone would walk up to me today outside this place."

This shows that everyone and anyone with a heart for wanting babies to be saved from a terrible death can make a difference. The LORD knows that the person you are has a special ability to reach certain others that nobody else can. I urgently encourage every person that reads this post to find an abortion "clinic" near to you and reach out to someone who needs to know that someone out there cares about her and her baby (also him and his baby as many fathers accompany their girlfriend). I plan at being at the Madison Planned Parenthood tomorrow and God has used me to help save babies and help their moms and families. I know that he can use you, too, in your own special way.

45
posted on 02/03/2005 8:20:39 PM PST
by Bellflower
(A new day is Coming!)

"In the end, what she needed was people to surround her with support and love and the confidence she could get the medical care she needed," Father Hermes said. "The people out in front of the clinic all of the time are the real warriors. If that presence had not been maintained over the years, this never would have happened. It was a beautiful moment, and it came on Holy Saturday. What a gift."

I believe the following stats are self explanatory. Even the stats for women and fetus health are misleading due to the original posted scenario. How many of the 6% were legitimate health issues. Also planned parenthood promotes their efforts because "we get many" who have rape/incest. All abortion is intrinsically evil therefore it is not for we humans to play God.

National Statistics

Finance-21%

Not ready-21%

Womans Life would change-16%

Relationship Problems - 12%

Too young -11%

_________________________________________________________

Fetus health-3%

Womans Health -3%

Rape/Incest -1%

49
posted on 02/03/2005 10:27:28 PM PST
by franky
(Pray for the souls of the faithful departed. Pray for our own souls to receive the grace of a happy)

Some information on Margaret Sanger-Planned Parenthood founder, originally called American Birth Control League:

"An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in six editions from 1798 to 1826:

All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room is made for them by the deaths of grown persons. We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality.4"

"Sanger nonetheless immersed herself in Malthusian eugenics. Grant wrote she argued for birth control using the scientifically verified threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension and overpopulation as its background. Sanger's publication, The Birth Control Review (founded in 1917) regularly published pro-eugenic articles from eugenicists, such as Ernst Rudin.7 Although Sanger ceased editing The Birth Control Review in 1929, the ABCL continued to use it as a platform for eugenic ideas.

Sanger built the work of the ABCL, and, ultimately, Planned Parenthood, on the ideas and resources of the eugenics movement. Grant reported that virtually all of the organization's board members were eugenicists. Eugenicists financed the early projects, from the opening of birth control clinics to the publishing of revolutionary literature.

Eugenicists comprised the speakers at conferences, authors of literature and the providers of services almost without exception. And Planned Parenthood's international work was originally housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society. The two organizations were intertwined for years.8 Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.10

It [charity] encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste. Instead of decreasing and aiming to eliminate the stocks that are most detrimental to the future of the race and the world, it tends to render them to a menacing degree dominant [emphasis added].11

The most serious charge that can be brought against modern benevolence is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression.12

It now remains for the U.S. government to set a sensible example to the world by offering a bonus or yearly pension to all obviously unfit parents who allow themselves to be sterilized by harmless and scientific means. In this way the moron and the diseased would have no posterity to inherit their unhappy condition. The number of the feeble-minded would decrease and a heavy burden would be lifted from the shoulders of the fit.13"

50
posted on 02/03/2005 10:38:22 PM PST
by franky
(Pray for the souls of the faithful departed. Pray for our own souls to receive the grace of a happy)

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